Hello fellow Bloggers,

I hope you all are having a decent time in these busy days. Today I am going to talk about, I assume like many of you, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. What we discussed in class about whether the book was anti-American or not, pursued me to think if the book was anti-American because while reading the book, I never thought of the book as an anti-American book. Rather, I saw the struggle and confusion of a man trying to get used to a new place and culture. That might just be since I am not American and was not affected or insulted by the anti-American message in the book to the extent an American or perhaps a Canadian would be. I’m not saying there weren’t moments I was shocked by some challenging ideas. For instance, Changez’s initial feelings about 9/11 shocked me, and I required a moment or two to digest what he was feeling towards a terrorist attack that killed thousands of people. However, I think all of these are features that help us understand the struggle, conundrum and the confusion Changez faces while moving to the US and more importantly while he unconsciously ‘Americanizes’. We discussed, in class, that what we took from the book depended on how/from which lens we read the book. The reason why I did not think the book wasn’t anti-American but rather gave an insight to why one might end up becoming an anti-American, thus, pointed out what in American society causes anti-Americanization, is most likely  because I read the book with great empathy towards Changez. That might be because I am experiencing, like some of you,  a similar but also in many ways different, transition in my life and there were a lot of  instances where I could relate experiences of Changez to my life; but overall, seeing how different people from different backgrounds interpreted the book differently, and how the book allowed it to be interpreted differently was really interesting and in a sense eye-opening.